e;
'Twill only give me pains of writing twice.
You know you must obey me, soon or late.
Why should you vainly struggle with your fate?"

Poor Arimant seems to be of the same opinion. He mutters something about
fate and free-will, and walks off with the billet-doux.

In the Indian Emperor, Montezuma presents Almeria with a garland as a
token of his love, and offers to make her his queen. She replies:--

"I take this garland, not as given by you;
But as my merit's and my beauty's due;
As for the crown which you, my slave, possess,
To share it with you would but make me less."

In return for such proofs of tenderness as these, her admirer consents
to murder his two sons and a benefactor to whom he feels the warmest
gratitude. Lyndaraxa, in the Conquest of Granada, assumes the same lofty
tone with Abdelmelech. He complains that she smiles upon his rival.

"Lynd. And when did I my power so far resign,
That you should regulate each look of mine?

Abdel. Then, when you gave your love, you gave that power.

Lynd. 'Twas during pleasure--'tis revoked this hour.

Abdel. I'll hate you, and this visit is my last.

Lynd. Do, if you can: you know I hold you fast."

That these passages violate all historical propriety, that sentiments to
which nothing similar was ever even affected except by the cavaliers of
Europe, are transferred to Mexico and Agra, is a light accusation. We
have no objection to a conventional world, an Illyrian puritan, or a
Bohemian seaport. While the faces are good, we care little about the
back-ground. Sir Joshua Reynolds says that the curtains and hangings
in an historical painting ought to be, not velvet or cotton, but merely
drapery. The same principle should be applied to poetry and romance. The
truth of character is the first object; the truth of place and time is
to be considered only in the second place. Puff himself could tell the
actor to turn out his toes, and remind him that Keeper Hatton was
a great dancer. We wish that, in our own time, a writer of a very
different order from Puff had not too often forgotten human nature in
the niceties of upholstery, millinery, and cookery.

We blame Dryden, not because the persons of his dramas are not Moors or
Americans, but because they are not men and women;--not because love,
such as he represents it, could not exist in a harem or in a wigwam, but
because it could not ex